Lawrence Wright’s “The Human Scale”

Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who covers international affairs for The New Yorker. But he has also been, in recent years, a man of the stage. After releasing his book “The Looming Tower,” Wright elaborated on his reporting experiences in a one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.” (Watch a video excerpt.) The play premiered at the New Yorker Festival four years ago and went on to play Off Broadway, at the Culture Project. This fall, the show became the subject of a documentary on HBO.

Now Wright is back onstage, with a new one-man play inspired by “Captives,” his piece about the crisis in Gaza, which ran in the magazine last fall. The play is called “The Human Scale,” and will run for four weeks in a co-production of the Public Theatre and 3-Legged Dog, under the direction of the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis. The New Yorker Festival is proud to present the first performance of the run, after which Eustis and Wright will appear in conversation. (Buy tickets.)

In the video below, Wright talks to WNYC about the how he got from journalism to theatre, and about his main aspiration for the show: to reveal the “human scale” of Israel-Palestinian conflict in the midst of so much anger.